Industry News

Health care agencies move to cloud talent management

With no hiring downturn in sight, health care agencies and managers are turning to cloud computing to manage talent. A report at Monster said that health care, the nation's largest industry, is projected to continue hiring for the foreseeable future.

Multiple talent pools to draw from
Health care operations, said Monster, tend to draw from a multitude of talent pools to find the correct candidates for their posted jobs. Computer jobs, IT and clinical staffing all involve intricate access-gathering about candidates by recruiters and the cloud technology makes it less time-consuming to scan various databases for prospective employees. With all the health care disciplines competing for talent through similar cloud-based platforms, storage is easy, and searching all that data is quicker, explained Monster. Pat Bruggerman is with Monster and spoke about how having the cloud makes their lives much easier.

Bruggerman added that managing the diverse talent groups is the biggest challenge that recruiters in health care are facing today.

More providers use the cloud
A recent HIMSS Analytics survey taken by 150 health care providers around the United States showed some surprising numbers. Eighty percent of those responding said they use cloud technology. The survey indicated that HCPs preferred the cloud for its deployment speed, lower maintenance costs and the provider's dearth of internal staff. Almost all of the responses indicated that the providers all planned to increase their cloud participation in the near future.

The HIMSS survey also detailed what providers were looking for when choosing a cloud platform. Technical security and physical access control were two of the oft-cited reasons for cloud merging, but the major indicator for health care providers was the cloud services operator's willingness to enter into a business associate agreement with them.

Only six percent of the respondents showed resistance to the cloud with half of them saying security concerns were the main obstacle to making the cloud leap. That six percent opposed to the cloud is in line with recently unveiled national statistics.

Thirty-three percent of the respondents to the survey also indicated that slow response times from the cloud provider was a concern with an additional 23 percent reporting that downtime issues and provider unavailability were enough to make the decision to cloud merge more problematic.